Drone airlines - how long?
 

Right now we've got military drones targeting 'persons of interest' in certain parts of the world, while in civvy street people are already travelling on automated light rail systems and buying autopilot equipped teslas. Other self driving cars and trucks will soon be on the roads, even delivering your amazon parcel or dominos pizza.

Given the level of automation and computer control in today's cockpit anyway, going the whole automated hog seems a relatively small leap in terms of technology, if not public perception, whereas the cost savings could be huge. The military would probably need to initiate - firstly on cargo, then on transport because they don't have to rely on commercial appeal, but can simply command people to do something. The bean counters would push it through the civvy operators, and if you could pass on enough of those costs in the form of significantly lower ticket prices for unmanned flights vs manned ones, the pax would line themselves up - the current crop of loCo operators being a case in point to the depths to which people subject themselves in pursuit of a bargain.

Appreciate this is somewhat the wrong sort of place to be espousing this sort of thing, but I reckon the change could happen within a generation: we'll soon get to a tipping point, and it could be sooner than we think. Or should it be that automation only happens to unskilled manual roles, not skilled professional, even educated ones such as professional pilots?!?

Uber will remain as popular even when its drivers are automated - it'll probably be more so as the robot won't have any dubious background checks to pass (or fail) on, as long as the price is less than a normal cab. Sure, they'll always be the refuseniks but they're the minority - the same thing will happen in the air. As MOL says of RyanAir, their bookings are full of poeple who swore they'd never fly with them again.

All it would take is one fatal accident........

I won't ever get into a motorised vehicle that is not driven/flown/operated by a human being.

Unlike many others I've never given O'Leary a penny and I never will.

That was undoubtedly true in the past, but those days are long gone.

A government that exposes its armed forces to undue and unnecessary risk runs the risk of being hauled through the courts if and when things go pear-shaped - Google "Snatch Land Rover", for example.

So don't expect the military to pioneer the development of pilotless passenger aircraft.

How do you move around airports? Most Airport shuttle trains are driverless.

I do concur with your other comments.

The drone airliner will be controlled by a human, just not one sat up front. In these days of locked cockpit doors how do the passengers actually know there is a crewed cockpit for sure?

You think too big... Unpiloted planes are great to move small cargo loads, leaving out the pilot and his/her seat gives another 100 kg of cargo capacity. So I would see potential in the small mail-run business or as delivery service (10 kg cargo load directly to the front lawn).

If you want to transport people, you need a cabin, probably pressurized, and facilities (galley, toilet). Adding a pilot is like adding a dedicated chair and some flight controls.

Plus the cost of hiring/employing said pilot.

No doubt it will happen one day. Life has taught me never to say never. However, not in my life time.......I hope!

There's always one.

They're not travelling at 70mph or faster.

Driverless cars will happen first, but it won’t take much longer than that.

If flying was just poling an aircraft around this sky this would have happened years ago. Erm... possibly. Fortunately, Messrs Honeywell, Thales etc. can be relied upon to produce bug ridden, rickety software that can be relied upon to produce unexpected results. Communication is not reliable enough to guarantee an uninterrupted connection which means that the aircraft will have to have the ability to fly autonomously. But to save a load of typing, tell me how a drone aircraft would deal with this.

"The first known fatal accident involving a Tesla engaged in Autopilot mode took place in Williston, Florida, on May 7, 2016." -- "Against a bright spring sky, the car’s sensors system failed to distinguish a large white 18-wheel truck and trailer crossing the highway" -- "kept his hands off the wheel for extended periods of time despite repeated automated warnings not to do so"

NTSB press release (Sep 12, 2017): "The Tesla driver’s pattern of use of the Autopilot system indicated an over-reliance on the automation and a lack of understanding of the system limitations." This sentiment comes up fairly often on PPRuNe, it seems; I would venture it also applies to people advocating fully automated cockpits.

You must be joking.

That automation is only certifiable BECAUSE of having humans on board to set it up, monitor it, and take over when necessary.

like engineers, radio operators and navigators - it won't be Big Bang - a gradual erosion is much more likely

eg start with an automatic system but 2 crew....

then it works so you drop one of the crew...

then it works so you drop the other crew............

that's what they 've done/are doing on the railways

"Evidence based Crew Levels"...................... by then people will be iusing auto cars/buses/trucks - it'll be an obvious change - and if it knocks £ 10 of a flight to NY or LA they'll all be for it

Quite - I should have made that clearer in terms of what I was envisaging. There will be a level of human oversight: to check everything's set up correctly before pushback for example, but the majority of the monitoring of the aircraft's systems will be done from a portacabin in Luton or Hounslow, rather than a little room at the front of the plane.

Portacabin? w t f :confused:

Why so derisory about it. I'm sure it'll be at the least a glorified OCC 'Ops Centre' similar to what the future of ATC will be with remote towers.

Imagine that eventually the remote ATC controllers (or robots) and the remote control pilots (or robots) will sit in one room, maybe the role will merge etc. etc. even more savings! :}

Cirrus have a big emergency lever....................

you could geta BIG parachute in the cockpit & crew sleeping area..........

I'm with you on the evolution, less so on the timeframe. Maybe my question should have been 'what percentage discount would get passengers onto a pilotless aircraft?' I reckon somewhere between a third and a half would get you to a critical mass...

Never, I hope.

As, once again, humans seem hell bent on doing them selves out of a job.

The number of people employed in the direct operation of the airlines fleet is massive, and if drone airlines take off, then all the people that will put out of work will be immense.

A £ 10 difference seems to be the threshold for people giving up on something decent and taking the cheap option in the airtravel business

So all we need is well specified, well designed, well written software, free of bugs running on bug free chips that have a totally reliable power source driven by people or systems that never make mistakes. What's so hard about that?

Meanwhile, every year humans scatter dozens of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes and their passengers across the landscape. But that's ok, because they know what they are doing... :E

Call me a cynic, but when I fly as a passenger I want whoever is controlling the aircraft to have as much of a vested interest in getting it down in one piece as I have. :O

Actually, computer systems can also "not know what they are doing". They are usually designed around the assumption that they have a complete picture of what is going on, and complete control over the process. When either assumption (or both) fails, the computer will depart its zone of expertise rather abruptly. A well-designed car or train control software can often recognize the problem and shut down until help arrives; an airplane might not have that luxury. ("Is there a software engineer on board?")

Is there really a solid economic driver to do away with pilots? Yes, pilots are expensive, but put up against the overall cost of operating a large passenger jet, the pilot's costs are, if not insignificnt, minimal.

Better to look for fuel economy improvements or lower maintenance costs.

Plus I think the psycological hurdle of getting aboard a pilotless aircraft will be a step too far for most passengers.

Mechta - I don’t agree. In fact I’d go along the line that millions of flights have ended incident free purely because there were pilots on board, not in spite of them. Until we grasp what pilots actually do to make up for the deficiencies in aircraft, their systems in the information supplied we haven’t a hope of removing them from aircraft.

The same was being said 40 years ago about flight engineers.

Look what happened to them.

Pilot workload was reduced through automation so that the pilots could take on the flight engineer's tasks? and for those tasks the pilots can't do, they phone home to base?

Passenger jets cost most when they're on the ground not doing anything, rather than in the air, earning revenue. Pilots don't just cost wages - there's the accommodation down route plus the caps on hours. Have 'em monitoring the systems remotely/centrally and you do away with all that, all for a small anti-social hours supplement to pay to compensate for a 24/7 shift pattern. You could also break the idea that the same pilot (or crew) have to fly the entire trip: 'pilot' A monitors/flys remotely the takeoff, then when his shift finishes, hands over to 'pilot' B who does the landing. Pilot A meanwhile has driven the 20 mins home, and is spending time with his family until his or her next shift starts again in 14 hours time (or whenever).

Yes, and the automation was driven, as it almost always is, by economics.

The suggestion that a pilot on board is equally unnecessary is just the logical extension of the same argument.

@DaveReid: no, I believe it isn't. The FE could be made redundant because other humans (pilots) were able to take over their task that automation couldn't take over. If you extend the argument (and the automation), you could maybe also eliminate the FO, but that strategy also relies on pushing some non-automated tasks onto the pilot. In any case, the pilot retains the task of supervising the automatic devices. To eliminate the pilot altogether, you have to a) automate all tasks, not just the "easy" ones, and b) do that to a degree that eliminates the need for on-board supervision, which is presently the fall-back. You can't do it in the same way (reduce workload, reduce the humans) because you have to reduce the workload to zero, moving the computer from its support role(s) into a position of responsibility. That looks like a qualitative difference with unique challenges, and while there may be some economic pressure towards achieving them, it is hard to predict when that's going to happen, if it ever does.

But yeah, maybe in the future we'll see camera drones doing the walk-around check on the aircraft.

Look at the legal arguments around "If a self driving car crashes and kills someone - who is to blame?"

I didn't say eliminate the pilot, I said eliminate the on-board pilot.

It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.

Liability issues has been settled in the U.K. for self-driving cars. It will be the manufacturer who will be responsible. This likely will be followed in other jurisdictions.

If you can distribute the cost for two pilots over 400 sold tickets there is very little economic drive... The costs for two pilots in a 19 seater with 12 sold tickets are more significant.
So economically pilotless small planes are more interesting. For cargo planes the psychological hurdle is not relevant and here goes a similar argument but then based on pilot wages per kilo cargo. And getting rid of the pilot allows another 100kg or so extra cargo in the plane.

So looking at current operations, I expect that the small mail runs (<1000kg max load cargo planes) are the first candidates for drone-replacement, but there also is an option to go to smaller (50-100kg load) unmanned planes (that can't even fit a pilot).

All good in theory MathFox, but in my experience small aircraft and freight operators are the least likely to have the inclination to invest heavily in brand new, state of the art, pilotless aircraft. If anything they tend to have relatively old machines and would be more likely to follow the pilotless trend some 20 years after the fact once the pilotless aircraft become available cheap on the used market.

In "2001, A Space Odyssey", there were 2 pilots AND flight attendants. Pan Am, wasn't it.
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It takes how long to get a brand new design from the drawing board into service? When Airbus or Boeing announce that they are developing an autonomous airliner that would take at least 20-30 years to enter service then I am not going to lose sleep over it. Most of the conversation is based on the false assumption that the two pilots are reading the paper and pressing the "land now" button.

False assumption or merely unkind stereotype? Anyway, the question is whether the paper reading and "land now" button pressing needs to be done at the front of the aircraft, or whether it can, and indeed will, be done remotely.

Seems to me, some of the arguments put forward against the idea echo those of the hand loom weavers, and things didn't come out too well for them.

Mechanical looms had limitations (thread count, colors) over hand weaving. Turns out, these limitations didn't matter so much. We're still discovering what the limitations of computer systems are--in aviations, some of these discoveries have already cost lives.